Cloud Standardization

A Cooperation between Microsoft and Fraunhofer FOKUS

Jan. 01, 2009

OVERVIEW

The
subcommittee SC 38 (Distributed Application Platforms and Services - DAPS) is
part of the Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1 of the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electronic
Commission (IEC). Since the formation of the SC 38 Working Group WG 3 on Cloud
Computing in 2009, an ongoing successful collaboration of Microsoft and
Fraunhofer FOKUS has produced a number of contributions to this working group.
Moreover, FOKUS provides experts that contribute to the activities of the NA
043 Committee for Norms for Information Technology and Applications NA
043-01-38 Work Committee Distributed Application Platforms and Services
(„Normenausschusses der Informationstechnik und Anwendungen NA 043-01-38 AA
Arbeitsausschuss Verteilte Anwendungsplattformen und Dienste“) of the German
Institute for Norms („Deutsches Institut für Normung, DIN)“, that constitutes
the German National Body (NB) within SC38.

CLOUD
COMPUTING USE CASES

As a basis
for the evaluation and development of new work, SC 38 WG 3 utilizes a use case
based approach. For this purpose, a methodology for the presentation and
analysis of use cases has been developed by FOKUS, including

A
classification of use cases with regard to legal, organizational, and technical
aspects.

Templates
for the presentation of use cases.

An approach
for analyzing relationships between use cases.

This
methodology is based on preparatory work done by FOKUS that is published in the
whitepaper “Cloud Concepts for the Public Sector in Germany – Use Cases".

Standing
Documents

On behalf
of the German NB, FOKUS maintains two Standing Documents on use cases:

“Standing
Document SD2: Compendium of Cloud Computing Usage Scenarios and Use Cases"
is an extensive collection of cloud computing use cases based on SD1.

Contributions
to ETSI Cloud Standards Coordination

In
collaboration with the European Commission, the European Telecommunication
Standardization Institute (ETSI) has established the so-called Cloud Standards
Coordination (CSC) group as part of the European Cloud Strategy. The objective
of CSC was to develop a comprehensive picture of the current state of
standardization in the area of cloud computing. Experts from Fraunhofer FOKUS
have acted as liaison from SC 38 towards this group. In addition, the SC38
Standing Documents have been provided to CSC as input material.

CLOUD
COMPUTING VOCABULARY AND REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE

The first
two international standards of SC 38 on cloud computing have been developed by
a collaborative team comprising experts from WG 3 and the Study Group SG 13 of
the International Telecommunication Union (Telecommunication Standardization
Sector) ITU-T:

Both
standards are expected to be published as free-of-charge documents by the end
of 2014:

The
reference architecture introduces a user and a functional perspective on cloud
computing systems. The user perspective describes the major roles that parties
involved in cloud computing service usage and provisioning can assume. The functional
perspective describes the technical components (or functional blocks) of a
cloud system.

Mapping to
ISO/IEC 20000-1. The international standard ISO/IEC 20000-1 describes
requirements on IT service provisioning in terms of processes of an IT service
provider. The collaborative team of SC 38 and SG 13 has formed an ad-hoc expert
group under the lead of experts from Fraunhofer FOKUS to analyze the
relationship between these processes and the activities of the Cloud Service
Provider role described in the reference architecture. An extensive report
summarizing the results of this analysis has been compiled and submitted to
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 40, the subcommittee responsible for maintaining the ISO/IEC
20000 standards family.

ACTUAL WORK

Cloud
computing service level agreements

Recently,
WG 3 of SC 38 has started a new project on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for
cloud computing. A three-part standard is under development that aims on
providing a framework for defining SLAs in a unified way allowing for
comparison of the offers of different cloud service providers. The three parts
of the standard are:

With the
finalization of the projects on cloud computing vocabulary and reference
architecture, SC 38 has established a study group to identify new work items. A
number of possible future projects have been discussed. Two of them have been
accepted as new SC 38 projects:

Cloud computing
data classification and data flows. The outcome of this project will be a
standard that describes data types and data flows defined by the
inter-relationship between cloud services and their usage through mobile
devices.

Cloud
computing interoperability and portability. Nowadays, the terms
interoperability and portability are used in various contexts, referring to a
number of different concepts. This standard will describe various types of
interoperability and portability between cloud services.